Part 17

"That's what Mrs. Torrey's saying between these lines." And she handed the letter back.

"Mrs. Torrey's a fine, noble old lady. Such sordid ideas never'd enter her head."

"Mrs. Torrey's a woman."

"And a good one--and so is Helen," maintained Richard. "Marrying's about the last idea in her head at present."

"I believe that is the theory--among men who know nothing about women."

"She's doubtless almost prostrated with grief."

"With anxiety, perhaps. Not with grief. Not for a worthless old drunkard."

"You forget, Courtney. He was her _father_."

Courtney lifted her eyebrows. "So much the more certain she detested him. She had to live right up against him."

Richard leaned forward slightly, to add emphasis to his rebuke. "I repeat, Helen is a good woman--a woman with a sense of duty. She must have loved him."

"Why repeat such twaddle?" inquired Courtney, unimpressed. "What has duty to do with hearts?"

Dick looked strong disapproval. "What is the matter, my dear? You're not talking in the least like yourself."

"You always make that same remark," observed Courtney, "whenever I say anything that does not suit you."

"Are you irritated by the prospect of Helen's coming? If you don't want her----"

"I am not irritated about anything. As for Helen, I care not a rap one way or the other."

Winchie had finished. He kissed his father, then his mother good night, and went upstairs. Richard came out of a deep study to say, "It's a pity Gallatin isn't free and here--if Helen comes."

"It would have made a good match," said Courtney judiciously. "A splendid living for Helen."

"I wasn't thinking of Gallatin's wealth," protested Richard, reddening. Then he laughed, "At least, not altogether."

"The living's the main point in marriage."

"What an unpleasant mood you're in."

"I? I never felt more amiable."

"Have I said anything to offend you?"

"Not a thing." She rose languidly. "You're still the model--not a single redeeming fault."

She stretched herself with slow, lazy grace. "But you," said he, "are a bundle of redeeming faults and vagaries--a bouquet of them." And he was about to kiss her.

She flung away from him with flashing eyes. He stared, amazed. "How you startled me!" she exclaimed, quickly changing her expression from fury to half-laughing irritation.

"Miss Caprice!" And his gaze was soft and brilliant.

There was a virgin coldness in her manner that puzzled and abashed him. "How I hate this body of mine, sometimes!" said she. "An admiring look makes me angry, and a kiss seems an insult. Come to me with your love when I'm old and ugly. Then, perhaps, I'll believe it."

And she strolled out of the room and upstairs. The instant she had her bedroom door locked, she knew why she had come away--knew she had been obeying an instinct warning her secret self that she could not many minutes longer endure the strain. "But really I am calm," she insisted. In the same second her wound opened and was aching and bleeding and throbbing, unhealed. "I can never forget--never!" she cried. "Was it only this body of mine he cared for? What does it matter? Even the little he gave was more than I had to give. I ought to have been more humble about giving--I who had so little. And what happiness he gave me in exchange! No--not happiness, but more than happiness." Her eyes strained into the night. It was so dreary--so lonely. "Basil!--Basil! I'm dying for you--dying from the core out!"

She flung her windows wide. The snow came whirling in. The wind was moaning among the branches. Somewhere, far away, a bell tolled. Silence, utter solitude, a stretch of white snow under a black sky, and the chilling cold. "Come to me!" she cried. "I am so cold--so lonely--so hungry! And I love you."

Even where a woman cannot doubt that her lover has forgotten, there are times when memory--of his vows so convincing, of his caresses that seemed the inspiration of her charms alone--makes her defy certainty and believe. And Courtney had no real reason to think him either false or forgetful. They had been torn apart when their love was still hungry and thirsty, when even the long calm that precedes satiety was still far in the future, when they were so absorbed in loving that they had not yet had time to begin to get acquainted with each other's real self. It was doubt of him that was forced, belief in him that was natural. "If he were not so strong, so honorable!" she cried. "Ah, if he were only where I could tempt him!"

Even the thought of Winchie now lost all power to check her; he was too much like part of herself. She seemed as placid in her slender youthfulness as those handsome matronly women who suggest extinct volcanoes covered with flowers and smiling fields. Beneath her manner of monotonous, emotionless calm she was battling with the temptation to take her boy and fly from that cold desolation of loveless loneliness, to fly to him. If Richard had not been absolutely apart from her life, absolutely out of her thoughts she would have hated him. As it was her rage fretted at the impersonal barriers and bonds that held her--not Richard, but conventionality and, above all, lack of money. "If only I had money!" she cried again and again.

But she had nothing--her clothes, a few dollars that must be paid out for expenses already incurred. "If I went to him, it would be to become his dependent, just as I am Richard's. Oh, the horror of being a woman! Bred to dependence; bred for the market; bred to tease some man into undertaking her support for life. There is the rotten spot in my whole life. If Richard had ever deigned to speculate as to what was going on in my head, he'd never have dared touch me. He'd have feared I was his only for hire. But would he care? Doesn't he expect me to be true because he supports me? Isn't that what marriage means, beneath the cant and pretense? Yes, I'm simply part of his property, and the pretenses that gloze it over only make it the more revolting. Oh, if men had sensibilities, and if they knew what women thought!--why we smile and flatter and stay on, in spite of neglect and insult!"

She felt that, if she should go to Basil, the day would come when their love would die of this poison exuding from the basic fact of their relations--his sense of his rights because of her dependence; or, her fear of losing or impairing her living; or, her feeling that since she took bread she must give body--all she had to pay with. Richard thought he could afford to be neglectful; and when it suited him to give passing attention to his property again--to walk in his garden and eat a little fruit from his tree--he thought he had a perfect right to do so. If Richard was thus, if all men believed thus, why fancy Basil an exception? Basil, in time, when passion cooled, would hold her in the same light disesteem. If a man lost his virtue, even hypocrisy did not go beyond a half smiling shake of the head; if a woman lost her virtue, she was "ruined." Ruined--that is, a worthless wreck. "No, I shall not go to Basil. No doubt, he still cares--in a man's way of caring. But he holds me, the unfaithful wife, cheap enough. If I were to lose reputation also, were to be unable to give him the pleasure of trespassing on another's property, were to be merely a ruined woman, living off him, he'd soon treat me like the slave that I am. No, I'll not change owners.... If only I had money!"

What, then? She had seen all along that she was like one sinking in the ooze of a marsh--softly, inevitably toward suffocation. "If I stay on here, I'll become like the rest of the settled, disillusioned married women. I'll become a chronic sloven and--as my disposition isn't toward fat, squatted good nature--a shrew. A slovenly shrew!" Why not? What had she left to live for? In a few years Winchie would be away at school--then in some city at profession or business--and married and out of her life. "I might as well give up. Why not?"

There seemed to be no reason. But our conduct in its main lines is not governed by reason, but by instincts that impel us even against will. When Richard had failed her at the outset of their married life, she had sunk; then her temperament of hope and energy had forced her up again in face of deepest discouragements. So now, while there was no reason why she should cease to sink, should begin to struggle, while Basil's announced engagement assuring a speedy marriage seemed just the thing to make her sink on, she began to rouse herself and to look about her. For the second time her longings and energies had lost their stimulus, their inspiration, their vitalizing center. And that center is to an unselfish nature as necessary as queen bee to swarm which clusters about her, labors for her, and renews through her. With human beings such as Courtney Vaughan longings and energies rarely die upon the corpse of their inspiration. After a while they fly upward, as did hers, and begin to circle in search of a new clustering center, a new reason for living and working on. "I can't stay here," she kept repeating. "I must go somewhere. I must do something. Where? What?" How settle her life problem so that it would be "settled right," and she could have peace and happiness? She found no answer. But she kept on thrusting the question at herself. It was as significant of her character as of her trend of thought that her cry "If only I had money!" changed to "If only I could _make_ money!"

*XVI*

They were at supper, Dick reading the paper, Winchie busy with bowl of rice and milk, Courtney listening to the storm that shrieked in baffled rage after each vain assault upon the house. Her whole being was quivering with the pain that never pierced her more acutely than when she was in the presence of Basil's vacant place at the table. Winchie, without looking up, broke the silence: "We shan't go, mamma, shall we, unless it clears up?"

Dick, turning the paper, happened to hear. "Go where?" he asked.

"To grandfather's."

"When?"

Courtney said: "Winchie and I are going to-morrow."

"Impossible," said Dick. "They'd think you were crazy."

"Perhaps I am," Courtney replied. "Anyhow, we're going."

"Why?"

"I need a change."

"Put it off till spring." And he resumed the newspaper as if the matter were disposed of.

"No. To-morrow," said she, not in the least aggressively; but her tone was of unalterable determination.

"Or, if you must go somewhere, why not Saint X? You can visit Pauline Scarborough or the Hargraves--and bring Helen March back with you."

"I prefer the farm."

He laid the paper down. "You're not serious?"

"Quite."

"Now, my dear--" he began. His tone was one he had unconsciously adopted from his grandfather. He used it whenever he, as head of the family, confronted an "irrational, feminine caprice."

"What's the use of reasoning with me?" interrupted she. "Didn't your grandfather teach you that women can't reason?"

"I'm willing for you to go to Saint X. But----"

She looked significantly toward Winchie. Dick took the hint, went back to his reading until they were alone. Then he resumed: "I'm sure you'll not persist now that I've pointed out to you----"

"If you wish me to keep my temper," interrupted she, "you'll not use that wheedling tone. I'd feel I was degrading Winchie by speaking to him in a way that belittled his intelligence."

Dick looked astonished. "I had no intention----"

"I know--I know," said she appealingly. "It doesn't matter. I really don't care anything about it.

"But you'll not go when it's so clearly a folly to----"

"I am going," said she. "You ought to be grateful that I have such inexpensive whims. Most of us silly women--" She paused, with a lift of the long, slender eyebrows. How absurd to gird at him whose opinions interested her as little as hers interested him!

He revolved what she had been saying, presently reddened. "I thought I had explained to you," said he, "that the laboratory is very expensive. I know I don't give you much. I've had to cut down the household allowance because I feel sure Gallatin will be withdrawing his capital. But just as soon as I----"

She was even of temper again. "You remind me of old Hendricks," interrupted she pleasantly. "You know, he made three people toil for him all their lives, with no pay and mighty poor board and clothes--on the promise of a legacy--and they died before he did."

But Dick was offended. "It seems to me," said he, "in view of what I'm doing at the shop----"

"Please don't," she cried. "You're trying to make me out an ingrate, who doesn't appreciate how you're toiling just for wife and child. Now, what's the fact? Isn't your work your amusement?"

"Of course, I like it, but----"

"Weren't you doing the same thing before you had a family? Wouldn't you be doing it if you should lose them? Isn't it your pride that you work solely for love of science?"

He looked disconcerted assent.

"Then the fact is, you spend most of your income on your own amusement, as much as if you drank it."

He reflected. "That never occurred to me before," said he. "Possibly I have viewed it too one-sidedly. I must think it over and see."

She shrugged her shoulders. "Pray don't, on my account."

He made no reply, put forward no further objections to her going, though the next morning developed a driving sleet. As she and Winchie were about to get into the carriage he asked; "How long will you be gone?"

"Until I feel better."

"If you are ill, you must not go in this weather."

She looked at him strangely. "If I were dying I should go," was her slow reply.

He hesitated, studied her small, resolute face, her fever-bright eyes, with a puzzled expression. "I suppose it's best to give a woman her way in her whims, so long as they're harmless," said he aloud, but to himself rather than to her. She finished wrapping up the boy, went out to the carriage, and got in. He lifted Winchie in, tucked them both carefully, bade them a last good-by, his expression grave and constrained.

In those fifteen miles through the searching cold, over roads like fields deep plowed and frozen hard, she debated how best to carry out her main purpose in going to that dreary farm--how to take her father partly, perhaps wholly, into her confidence so that she might get his help--for help she must have. Her mother was now impossible--quite demented on the subject of religion latterly through the long steeping of mind and heart in a theology whose heaven was hardly less formidable as an eternal prospect than its hell, and whose hell was a fiery sea canopied by shriek and stench of burning multitude. The old maid sisters had neither experience nor judgment, only bitterness. To them it would be inconceivable that a married woman, with a husband who supported her in comfort, could be other than blissfully happy. But her father-- He had been a man of affairs, judge. He had lived and read and thought. She had heard her mother rebuke him for expressing "loose" opinions; probably he was concealing opinions even more liberal and enlightened and humane. Perhaps he could give her practical advice--or at least sympathy.

But, arrived at the farmhouse, she had only to look into those four countenances to see that she was among people who knew no more of the life of the present day--or indeed of the real life of any day, even of what they themselves actually believed and felt--than deep-sea oysters in their bed know of Alpine flowers. Even her father-- In this remote desert he had lost what knowledge of life he formerly possessed. She was now developed enough to realize that he in fact never did know much about life, that his was a book education only. She had journeyed for help in vain; she was still alone, dependent wholly upon her own courage and resource.

"Don't you wish we hadn't come, mamma?" said Winchie when they were in the room assigned them.

"No," she replied truthfully. She was watching the hickory flames in a calmer mood than she had known for weeks; at least she had got away where she could think, could get an outside point of view upon the posture of her affairs. "No, indeed," she went on to Winchie leaning against her knee and looking up at her. "No, I feel better already."

"Then I guess I can stand it," said the boy with a sigh.

"You don't know about the hill where we can coast."

As he had never coasted, this did not lighten the impression made on him by the gloomy farmhouse sitting room, its walls and ceilings covered with somber paper, by the shriveled grandparents, with deep-sunk, lack-luster eyes, by the sharp, sour faces of the two old maids. But next day, when the sun came out and the farmhands beat down a track on the long hill, Winchie found the situation vastly improved. Flat on her breast on a sled, with the boy breathless and happy upon her back, she initiated him into the raptures of "belly-buster."

"Why, mamma, you look like a little girl, not a bit grown up," cried he after they had been at it all morning and were tugging up the hill for one last, magnificent rush down before going home to dinner. And she did indeed seem to be a sister of Winchie's, one hardly in her teens. Of course, the short skirt and her smallness of stature helped. But it was in her cheeks, in her eyes, in the curve of her lips as she showed her white teeth in the happiest of smiles.

"I _am_ a little girl," declared she. And before starting out with him after dinner she did her hair in two long braids that hung below her waistline.

They coasted every day; they took long sleigh rides, long romping walks; they hunted rabbits, went fishing through the ice, were uproarious outside the house and in--the latter to the scandal of the three women of the family, who regarded such goings-on as clearly forbidden in the Scriptures. Even Sunday wasn't so bad as might have been expected; for it snowed too violently for Mrs. Benedict to take them to the church where her favorite doctrines were expounded, and they slipped away to the glorious outdoors. In a sheltered hollow under a shelf of rock they built an enormous snow man, with a top hat of bark. They ate what Winchie regarded as the most wonderful meal of his life at the cottage of one of the farmhands. Never before had he seen such brown brownbread or such molassessy molasses or eaten off such big, strong dishes that there wasn't the least danger of breaking, no matter what you did to them. And he was fascinated by the farmhand's wife and daughter, both acting their company best and eating with the little finger of each hand stuck straight out. And in a box in the corner of the room where they ate was a most exciting brood of little chickens, chirping and squeaking. And in the midst of dinner a huge, hairy, black dog suddenly snatched a piece of meat from the farmhand's plate and retired to the kitchen with it. "Ain't he a caution?" said the farmhand, and Winchie thought he certainly was.

Courtney was like those who put out to sea, leaving their troubles at the one shore, not to think of them until they touch the other. All around were the white hills, and there seemed to be no beyond. She abandoned her plan of studying her situation. She stopped thinking; she ate and slept, and played with the boy, and pretended that she was the little girl she looked, home from school for the holidays, and half hoping somehow something would happen so that there wouldn't be any school any more. She did not think, but she hoped. How? What? Where? She did not know; simply hope, that can burst the strongest grave despair ever buried it in.

Well along in the second week, toward the middle of the afternoon, she and Winchie were on the long hill, rounding out one more happy day. She was as happy as he. When all is lost save youth and health, what is really lost? She on her breast on the sled and he sprawled along her back, his arms round her neck, they shot down the steep with shouts and screams. They stopped, all covered with flying snow, in a soft bank beneath which the zigzag fence was deep buried. They rolled in the snow, washed each other's faces, stood up--were within a few feet of a man in a fur-lined coat almost to his heels. They stared, astounded. Then Winchie's face darkened and hers grew more radiant still as the tears sprang to her eyes.

"Basil!" she murmured, Winchie forgotten. "Oh--_Basil_!" And all in that instant the misery of those months of despair was gloriously transformed into joy.

"Courtney!" he cried. "How beautiful you are!"

He was extraordinarily handsome himself at that moment. Love is a matchless beautifier; and if ever love shone from a human countenance, it was shining, irradiating from his just then. With Winchie jealously watchful they shook hands. "Aren't you and Winchie going to speak to each other?" she asked. And Basil, with reluctance and some confusion held out a hand which the boy very hesitatingly touched.

"I'll pull your sled to the top for you," Basil offered. "Get on, Winchie."

The boy planted his feet more firmly in the snow. "We were going home," said Courtney.

"Get on, Winchie," cried Basil friendlily. "I'll haul you."

"I'm going to walk," replied the boy sullenly.

Courtney understood. "Get on, Winchie," said she. "I'll pull it."

The boy obeyed. The rope was long, so Basil felt free to speak in a lowered voice. "Seeing you--hearing you--touching you-- O my darling! my Courtney!"

She forgot where she was, who she was, everything but love. Love! The road danced before her. The cry of the chickadees, the twitter of the snowbirds, the call of Bob White from the fence sounded like supernal music in her ears. The blood tingled and dizzied her nerves. Love again! "You care--still?" she murmured.

"Care? There's only you for me in all the world."

She caught her breath, like the swinger at the long swing's dizziest height when it halts to begin the delirious descent. "Love!" she murmured. "Love!"

"And I know you love me," he went on. "I've never doubted--not once. I've tried to doubt, but I couldn't. Up before me would come those dear eyes of yours, and--Courtney, there isn't a kiss--or a caress--hardly a touch of the hands you and I have ever lived that I haven't felt again and again."

"Don't!" she pleaded, her eyes swimming. "Don't, or I'll break down. My love--my love!"

"I don't know what would have become of me," he went on, "if I hadn't known you'd send for me--yes--in spite of your note. I expected it, for I knew you wouldn't be able to come. The more I thought, the clearer I saw. Not to go any further, there was the boy." He glanced round at Winchie; the angry gray-green eyes were fixed upon him. He glanced away, disconcerted. But he forgot Winchie when his eyes returned to her. "Beautiful! Beautiful--little girl," he murmured, his look sweeping her small, perfect figure to the edge of her short skirt. "I like your new way of wearing your hair."

She blushed. "I did it to make me feel young. I've been feeling so old--old and tired and lonely."

"Thank God, you sent for me."

"Sent for you! A hundred times a day in thought." She laughed aloud, sparkling like the ice-cased boughs in the late afternoon sun. "A thousand thousand times in longing--every time my heart beat."

"Oh, it is so good to be with you!" He drew in a huge draught of the clean, cold, vital air. "Does the sun anywhere else shine on such happiness as this? But I've been mad with happiness ever since the word came."

"The word? What word?"

"Vaughan's letter. I knew you got him to write it."

Courtney stopped short. "I!" she exclaimed. "I don't know what you mean."